Talk About Redundancy!

He calls it “fat,” I call it “fluff.”

Please don’t do this!

BTW, if you’re a teacher, I recommend this comic. The cartoonist is a teacher, and he’s pretty good.

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Good expository writing is concise—all the necessary words, but no more. Redundancy is extra words that you don’t need. Those extra words say what you already said.

Here are a couple sentences from a NASA press release. I’m a bit ashamed to reveal the source because the press release contains a bunch of bad writing (including carelessness: “…including released of water vapor.”)

These two sentences each contain a redundancy:

The ongoing examination of Bennu – and its sample that will eventually be returned to Earth – could potentially shed light on why this intriguing phenomenon is occurring.

Many of the ejected particles are small enough to be collected by the spacecraft’s sampling mechanism, meaning that the returned sample may possibly contain some material that was ejected and returned to Bennu’s surface.

Here’s the rule, dating back at least as far as Joel Chandler Harris:

If you can leave a word out, leave it out.

PS—I ran into a comic that makes the point, too:

Writing concisely saves your reader time and effort (and irritation), because when you don’t repeat yourself, your reader doesn’t have to read the same thing twice. I’ve written about redundancy before. Use the search box in the upper right corner to find more on this subject.

He could have said:

• Get the sign painter back!
• Get the sign painter here!
• Get the sign painter again!

That sentence would be correct if the sign painter had already been there more than once, though.

When you write, don’t repeat yourself!

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

Even I do this! Well, sometimes. In spoken language. I don’t recommend it in expository writing, though. 

It’s in the last panel. Do you see it?

Yup; “tiny little.” You need only one of those words.

The time has come to write about fluff again—I ran into a comic on the subject. We curmudgeons also call fluff redundancy, wordiness, and unnecessary verbiage. Probably some saltier terms, too. Fluff is the antithesis of conciseness, one of my gold rules for good writing.

I’ve featured this gal in Jump Start before. Several times, actually; that one was just a sample.

So when you write, look over what you wrote. (You always proofread, don’t you?) Do you see any words that you could delete without changing the meaning? Delete ’em! Your readers will thank you.